This podcast is the first of several to observe the 50th anniversary of NCSL. On this episode we track the development of legislatures over the last 400 years and talk with a range of guests about the role of legislatures in the jigsaw puzzle of American governance.
This podcast is the first of several to observe the 50th anniversary of NCSL. The organization has been an integral part of the change in state legislations over the last half century. NCSL provides research to the states on myriad public policy topics, offers a unified voice in Washington where it lobbies on behalf of the states, and serves as a convener of scores of meetings every year in person and virtually to help legislators and legislative staff from across the nation share ideas and solutions. On this episode we track the development of legislatures over the last 400 years and talk with a range of guests about the role of legislatures in the jigsaw puzzle of American governance.
Our guests include political scientist Don Kettl; former NCSL staffer Karl Kurtz; Sabrina Lewellen, assistant secretary of the Arkansas Senate and current staff chair at NCSL; Bill Pound, longtime NCSL executive director; historian Pev Squire, former NCSL staffer Brian Weberg; and Natalie Wood, NCSL’s vice president of policy and research.
Ed: Hello and welcome to “Our American States,” a podcast from the National Conference of State Legislatures. I’m your host, Ed Smith.
BP: I’ve always been fascinated by legislatures. They are the bedrock institution of our system. One of the three branches, but the first branch.
Ed: That was Bill Pound, who served as NCSL’s executive director for 32 years before retiring in 2019. He is one of several guests on this special podcast that kicks off the 50th anniversary of NCSL.
NCSL was founded in 1975 and since then has grown to nearly 200 employees in its Denver and Washington, D.C., offices. The organization provides research to the states on myriad public policy topics, offers a united voice in Washington where it lobbies on behalf of the states and serves as a convener of scores of meetings every year in person and virtually to help legislators and legislative staff from across the nation share ideas and solutions.
Before NCSL was founded, state legislatures had already existed in one form or another for more than 350 years. But the role of legislatures in the jigsaw puzzle of American governance had evolved significantly over the centuries. They went from being the center of governmental power in the Colonial Era to a low point of influence following the Civil War and fought their way back to coequal partners in state government over the past 50 years. I asked Natalie Wood, NCSL’s vice president of policy and research, about the role of NCSL and its relationship to legislatures when it was founded. She said it reminded her of an old NCSL tagline, The forum for America’s Ideas.
NW: And I really think that’s an accurate description of who we were and who we are. We serve as a place, virtual now or in person, either one, where our members can get together and yes, share ideas, learn from each in a bipartisan way. A way that allows for a give and take on both sides or many different aspects of a policy issue.
Ed: Long before NCSL came on the scene, legislatures played an enormous role in American governance, starting with the first session of the House of Burgesses in Virginia in 1619. The legislatures that followed in the colonial period and early years of the republic had significant authority. In many instances, they appointed the governor and other top officials. It is not surprising that people who freed themselves from the rule of a king did not want to put themselves under the strong hand of an executive officer. Even by the 1830’s, Alexis de Tocqueville in his book “Democracy in America” described state legislatures as having overarching authority in the states. But the tide had already started to turn. Changes, such as the direct election of governors played considerable power from the legislatures.
Historian Pev Squire told me how legislatures started to change.
PS: The people who wrote those first constitutions had greater confidence in legislatures than they did in certainly the executive branch and so they kept governors and the courts under the legislature’s thumb. And that was something that the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787 resisted a little bit, particularly Madison did not like the fact that state legislatures were so powerful and so dominant.
Ed: Many people began to think legislatures had too much authority Squire says and there was pressure for reform.
PS: I think they were just entrusted with so much power that it was inevitable that there would probably be a backlash. In subsequent constitutions and in amendments to existing constitutions, legislatures have some of their powers whittled away and governors in particular were given more power than they had originally been granted.
Ed: In the post-Civil War period, legislatures began to lose even more power. The rise of muckraking journalism in the early 1900s exposed corporate and government corruption and governors gained more power. As more authority shifted to the executive branch, legislatures increasingly found themselves dependent on that branch for money and other resources. Lobbyists also gained more influence in state governments and legislatures saw their share of power shrink in the first half of the 20th century.
After the Civil War Squire says:
PS: Power began to transfer to the national government because there were lots of national issues that had to be resolved in terms of the economy, managing railroads and all those sorts of things and so legislatures in the 19th century were not well-respected institutions. They were under a lot of pressure to improve their performance.
Ed: The 1962 U.S. Supreme Court case Baker v Carr, along with decisions that followed, established what is referred to as one person, one vote. The practical effect was that electoral districts needed to be allocated based on population and that each districted needed to have about the same number of people. The results were significant for all elected offices, but particularly for state legislatures. Karl Kurtz, a former senior leader at NCSL who was there at the organization’s founding, explains why.
KK: Legislatures before the one-person, one-vote decisions were notoriously malapportioned. It was very much to the advantage of rural folks, rural districts and they for the most part ran legislatures all over the country. What did happen at about the same time and was probably a direct result of the redistricting was the legislative strengthening movement. So, in the late 1960s led by the speaker of the House in California, Jesse Unruh, he shepherded up through California a complete reform and a California legislature, which today is sort of similar in style and operation to that of the Congress, back then was very much of a citizen legislature.
Ed: Unruh formed an organization called the Citizen’s Conference on State Legislatures that received substantial grants from large foundations. The panel undertook a study of state legislatures. It was published as “The Sometimes Governments,” a book that had significant effect on the legislative strengthening movement even if experts subsequently agreed it was deeply flawed as a piece of social science research. Kurtz picks up the story.
KK: If you look at that book, the model that’s in there, is everybody should be like California and California was aspiring to be like Congress. The reaction to the study: bad social science. It was really good politics though. It was good strategy.
Ed: While many legislatures did not want to be just like California, they did institute reforms and an increasing number of people in and out legislatures began to focus on how to make legislatures once again a coequal branch of government. One clear effect was how frequently legislatures met, Kurtz says.
KK: Probably 40 of the legislatures were biannual; met only every other year. And within 20 years probably of that whole movement there was just the reverse. Forty of them had annual sessions.
Ed: Efforts to form a national organization to represent state legislatures started in the early 1970s in the belief that to be a coequal branch of government, legislatures needed a single entity to represent them. Three organizations that represented different parts of legislatures came together to form NCSL, which was intended to signal to the nation the importance of state legislatures. Kurtz points out:
KK: The large part of what drove the merger was to try to get a unified voice for legislatures.
Ed: In the 1970s, the structure and staffing of legislatures started changing. Legislatures started spending more time in session and also more time working during the interim. In short, most legislatures were spending more time on their elected jobs as the ’70s progressed. Bill Pound, NCSL’s longtime executive director, recalls his view of legislatures when he joined the organization.
BP: How I viewed them may have been much more favorable that how the public viewed them, much of the public at the time. I’ve always been fascinated by legislatures. They are fascinating institutions. They are the bedrock institution of our system. One of the three branches, but the first branch of government.
Ed: The one-person, one-vote court decisions in the 1960s changed the way districts were drawn and who was elected to legislatures. But other forces were changing legislatures also, Pound says. Legislatures were faced with significant policy decisions around education, healthcare, welfare reform and a host of other issues. The state-federal relationship had an outsized effect, Pound says.
BP: I think the second factor besides the court decisions and the representation and the kinds of people that representational change brought in because they brought in a new generation of people into the legislature that you know were from different districts and more representative than they had been. But I think also it was driven by the growth of state government, which was fueled by the federal government going back to the New Deal to Roosevelt and the programs. So many of them ended up being managed by state government.
TM: 10:28
Ed: If you want to understand the policy concerns of legislatures, Pound says, you need to follow the money.
BP: It’s where the state spends a lot of money. Education, highway transportation, social services those kinds of things that were less true in the older days. This is also driven, too, by what’s going on at the federal level.
Ed: Along with more legislatures meeting annually, legislatures over the last several decades began doing a lot more committee and other work during the interim – the period between legislative sessions. Pound says that allowed legislatures to get a lot more work done.
BP: Well, the interim clearly was nothing like most interims are today where the legislature isn’t in floor session, may not be able to enact a law because they are not formally meeting, but has committees working year-round or for a period of months in developing the background of a bill or assessing a problem and trying to come up with what they think is the appropriate solution for it and that made a big difference.
Ed: Legislatures are not isolated from all the other changes in society. Technology alone from the development of the personal computer to the rise of social media, had a profound effect on legislatures over the last 50 years as did the precipitous decline of journalists covering legislatures. Don Kettl is a long-time political science academic and an author of more than two dozen books on American government. His view is that most domestic policy in the country is being largely driven at the state level by both governors and legislatures. He talked about this trend of policy being at the state level.
DK: The reality is that increasingly the policy decisions are being made in the states and where the big fundamental issue is about things that people care about are happening at the state and the local level. What we’ve seen increasingly I think is a shift in rhetoric in the news coverage towards the federal government. While at the same time, the real action is happening in the states and because of the fact that we don’t sadly have as many state government reporters as we used to, a lot of it is happening below the radar. But it is nonetheless tremendously important and it is shaping the way that everything from policies dealing with the homeless to transportation to the school policy are being shaped by state governments.
Ed: The legislative strengthening movement also led to more robust legislative staffing. In some states, the executive branch may have drafted most of the legislation and had an outsized control of the fiscal issues. As states added nonpartisan legislative agencies for bill drafting and specialized fiscal staff, they gained ground as a co-equal branch of government, Pound says.
BP: States developed their legislative councils, which meant they had a number of generalists and still do. But they also got far more specialized and on having full-time knowledge and somebody who had to report to the legislature, not to the governor.
Ed: Legislative stuff grew both in numbers and expertise. Budget staff grew significantly, a development that made legislatures better able to control spending instead of accepting what came from the executive. The period also saw the growth of staff on policymaking committees where the bulk legislative work is done. Brian Weberg, who served as a senior manager at NCSL focusing on legislative management for more than 30 years, notes that legislative staff often operate behind the scenes.
BW: Legislative staff, they are the folks behind the black curtain. They are the people who keep the trains running in the legislative institution, are the backbone of how these places work, why they work.
Ed: He also notes that from the 1970s into the 90s, staffing increased as legislatures needed people to handle information technology, human resources and other institutional needs. The unique aspect of NCSL is that it brings together both legislators and legislative staff. The nine professional staff groups associated with NCSL offer legislative staff a place to meet and share ideas with their colleagues. I asked Sabrina Lewellen, the assistant secretary of the Arkansas Senate and current staff chair at NCSL, about the value of the staff groups.
SL: Absolutely priceless. It is an irreplaceable necessity to have organizations like NCSL to help ensure that there is professional training, support, guidance and feedback for staff. And this is what state legislatures need, require and deserve for its functionality. The legislature as an institution has really only been made better because of NCSL and the professional staff platforms that it has helped to provide throughout its 50-year existence. It’s just invaluable.
Ed: If the last 50 years brought a lot of change and challenge for legislatures, the next 50 promise more of the same. Artificial Intelligence, housing, drug overdoses and workforce shortages are just a few of the issues before legislatures now. And the past teaches us that some of the most difficult problems may not be apparent yet. Natalie Wood says she doesn’t need a crystal ball to know how legislatures will handle the challenges down the road. Legislatures with a deliberative, transparent process will be up to the challenge.
NW: I think processes are sound. I think legislatures have proven their ability to be adaptable and to be evolutionary.
Ed: And the final question, how has NCSL met its mission over the last 50 years. Bill Pound thinks it did pretty well.
BP: I think it has been largely successful like anything we have, you have your ups and downs, but I think legislatures are clearly very different institutions than they were in 1970. In terms of the way legislatures do business, the interchange of information, which is just a core of NCSL’s being, I think has been very, very effective.
Ed: I’ve been talking with Don Kettl, Karl Kurtz, Sabrina Lewellen, Bill Pound, Pev Squire, Brian Weberg and Natalie Wood about the history of state legislatures in the first 50 years of NCSL.
We will present additional podcasts observing NCSL’s 50th anniversary in the coming year. Thanks for listening.
TM: 17:30
You can check out all the podcasts from the National Conference of State Legislatures by searching for NCSL podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast “Our American States” dives into some of the most challenging public policy issues facing legislators. On “Across the Aisle” host Kelley Griffin tells stories of bipartisanship. Also check out our special series “Building Democracy” on the history of legislatures.